# The 'Great Resignation' and the Search for Purpose: Re-evaluating Work Design for Existential Sustainability
> Why 47M Americans quit in 2021 reveals a structural flaw in work design. Explore existential sustainability as a lens for rethinking employee engagement.
**Author:** Michael Kovnick
**Publisher:** Existential Sustainability (https://existentialsustainability.com)
**Published:** 2026-08-19T21:25:43.071481+00:00
**Updated:** 2026-08-26T07:32:56.993615+00:00
**Category:** Frameworks
**Type:** essay
**Audience:** BusinessAudience
**Temporal coverage:** 2021/2023
**About:** Great Resignation, Work design, Existential sustainability
**Mentions:** Michael Kovnick, [MIT Sloan Management Review](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6717551), [Harvard Business Review](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1053818), [OECD](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q132205)
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**Related:** [The Ghost in the Machine: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and the Promise of Existentially Sustainable Governance](https://existentialsustainability.com/md/the-ghost-in-the-machine-decentralized-autonomous-organizations-daos-and-the-promise-of-existentially-sustainable-governance) · [Beyond Greenwashing: How AI Is Reshaping Corporate Sustainability Reporting (And What It Means for Existential Design)](https://existentialsustainability.com/md/beyond-greenwashing-how-ai-is-reshaping-corporate-sustainability-reporting-and-what-it-means-for-existential-design) · [Stakeholder Fusion vs Stakeholder Management](https://existentialsustainability.com/md/stakeholder-fusion-vs-stakeholder-management)
---Something happened between 2021 and 2023 that economists didn't fully anticipate and that HR consultants still haven't properly explained. Roughly 47 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021 alone. Not because they found better-paying work or were retiring. Many quit into uncertainty: freelance arrangements, career pivots, extended gaps, or nothing yet. Work had stopped making sense to them.

Standard explanations arrived quickly: pandemic-induced reflection, burnout, pent-up savings, a hot labor market. All true. But I suspect those were symptoms, not causes. What kept driving resignations even after the labor market cooled was a structural mismatch between how most organizations design work and what people need from it to sustain their participation over time.

This essay isn't about the Great Resignation as a labor market event. It's about what that wave of quitting reveals when you apply a particular analytical lens, existential sustainability, to work design itself. Michael Kovnick developed this framework in his 2025 paper "Existential Sustainability: A Structural Approach to Anti-Extractive Tourism" to analyze tourism business models. Its core diagnostic logic applies with uncomfortable precision to how organizations treat the people doing their work.

The question the framework forces is simple and devastating: can the thing that keeps workers engaged be removed without causing the system to fail?

## A Framework Built for Tourism That Keeps Explaining Other Things

Kovnick's paper introduces existential sustainability as a property of business structure: where removing community benefit would cause operational collapse, not reputational damage or certification loss. His research analyzes a 19-year longitudinal case of a US-based tour operator in Europe that retains 72% of gross revenue within local communities (compared to an industry norm of 20-30%), operates with strict volume caps of 250 guests per year per destination and 18 guests per group, and has maintained 100% partner retention over two decades. It works not because the operator is virtuous, but because the operator can't survive without the community relationships that produce the product.

That's the structural insight. Virtue is nice. Structure is reliable.

Kovnick introduces what he calls the Sustainability Removal Test: can the sustainability practice be stripped away without causing immediate business failure? If yes (if you can remove the community benefit, the local partnerships, the ethical sourcing) and the business keeps running, then the sustainability was performative. An add-on. A veneer.

If no, if removing the community integration means the product literally doesn't exist anymore, then the sustainability is existential. Load-bearing.

Apply that test to work design.

Can an organization remove the conditions that make work purposeful (autonomy, contribution, human connection, the sense that what you're doing matters) and keep operating? Of course it can. Organizations do this constantly. They extract labor for years, sometimes decades, before the cumulative cost shows up in turnover rates, disengagement surveys, and resignation waves. Extraction works because the damage is slow and diffuse.

By the framework's own logic, most organizational work design is performative. Purpose statements, values posters, engagement initiatives are removable. Add-ons. The structure of the work doesn't require them to function.

## What Extraction Looks Like at the Organizational Level

In tourism, Kovnick describes economic leakage: revenue generated at a destination flowing out to foreign-owned operators, international hotel chains, and centralized booking platforms rather than staying local. Industry leakage rates run 40-80% of gross revenue. Communities host the tourism but don't capture its value.

The organizational parallel is obvious once you see it. Workers generate value that flows to shareholders and senior executives, with workers themselves capturing a shrinking fraction. Well-documented, and true for decades. But the more interesting extraction isn't purely financial; it's the extraction of meaning.

Work designed for maximum efficiency strips out the elements that make it intrinsically rewarding: variety, judgment, craft, relationships, contribution to something that outlasts a quarterly report. What's left is a transaction. The organization gets labor; the worker gets a paycheck. Transactions are inherently unstable, because the moment either party finds a better deal elsewhere, the relationship ends.

The Great Resignation was, in large part, a massive repricing of that transaction. Workers decided the paycheck wasn't sufficient compensation for work that had been stripped of everything else.

What's striking is how many resignations weren't primarily about pay. MIT Sloan Management Review's [analysis of the Great Resignation](https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/) identified toxic culture, lack of recognition, poor management, and absent learning opportunities as drivers that outweighed compensation in predicting who left. The financial transaction was acceptable. The meaning transaction had collapsed.

## Structural vs. Performative in Work Design

Here's where the framework becomes useful.

Most organizational responses to disengagement are performative in exactly the sense Kovnick describes. Free lunches. Flexible Fridays. Wellness programs. Values workshops. All can be cut in the next downturn without changing the fundamental architecture of how work gets organized, how decisions get made, or how value gets distributed.

Structural responses change the underlying design in ways that make extraction self-defeating.

Consider the difference between a company offering a profit-sharing bonus (performative, can be suspended, capped, or eliminated) and one where workers hold equity vesting at meaningful rates (structural; removal would require renegotiating the whole relationship). Or the difference between a manager who "encourages" autonomy (performative, depends entirely on that individual's disposition) and a job architecture built with decision-making authority at the worker level (structural; removing it would require redesigning the role entirely).

Run the Sustainability Removal Test here: if you removed the thing tomorrow, would the work relationship survive? Would the worker stay? If yes (if they'd stay anyway because they need the paycheck, because switching costs are high, because the market is tight) then the practice wasn't structural. It was ornamental.

Structural work design creates conditions where the organization can't extract without degrading its actual product. And that shapes performance, not only worker wellbeing.

## Why Volume Caps Are a Structural Concept Worth Stealing

One of the more counterintuitive elements of existential sustainability is its embrace of deliberate volume constraints. Kovnick's operator caps groups at 18 guests, limits annual guests per destination to 250, and restricts operations to 14 weeks per year per destination. These aren't marketing choices. They're structural constraints that prevent overuse of the assets (local relationships, community access, authentic experience) that make the product worth buying.

Academic literature on the tourism area life cycle describes how destinations progress from discovery through growth to saturation and decline. The relationships and qualities that made a place attractive get consumed by the volume they attract. Kovnick's operator has kept one destination stable for 19 years by refusing to scale past the point where scaling destroys what's being scaled.

Now consider what happens when organizations refuse to apply any equivalent logic to their workforce.

A knowledge worker's carrying capacity is the amount of work someone can do while still thinking carefully, maintaining relationships that make their work good, learning continuously, and finding the process worth participating in. Most organizations treat this capacity as infinite, or at least as something to push against until something breaks.

What breaks is invisible at first. Thinking degrades before output metrics catch it. Relationships fray before anyone measures relationship quality. Learning stops before skill stagnation becomes obvious. And then the worker quits, or doesn't quit but stops working well, which is arguably worse.

Can organizations design for human carrying capacity, not as a wellness initiative, but as a production constraint? The argument would be that exceeding it degrades what the organization produces.

I'm not certain how to operationalize this across every type of work. But organizations that figured out some version of it (that treated deep, sustained, high-quality human contribution as an asset with real capacity limits) almost certainly came through the Great Resignation in better shape than those that didn't.

## The Commission Problem, Translated

Kovnick's zero-commission policy deserves attention because it's structurally unusual. Most tourism operators work through commission-based relationships with local partners, guides, restaurants, craft workshops. Commissions create incentive structures that distort partner selection toward whoever pays the most rather than whoever offers the best experience.

Kovnick's operator eliminates this entirely. Partners are selected for quality and community integration, paid by guests at local rates, with no financial intermediation by the operator. The result: 100% partner retention over 20 years. That's remarkable. It suggests that when you remove the extraction mechanism from a relationship, the relationship becomes durable.

The organizational analogue isn't exact, but it's suggestive. Many management systems are commission structures, incentive architectures that select for measurable, attributable, short-term outputs at the expense of harder-to-measure things that make organizations function: trust, institutional knowledge, collaborative problem-solving, willingness to help colleagues without claiming personal credit.

Performance management systems rewarding individual output metrics undervalue relational and collaborative dimensions of work. They pay for what's easy to count. Like commission-based tourism partnerships, they tend to erode underlying relationships over time.

The structural alternative isn't "no performance management"; it's performance architecture that makes the organization unable to function if those relational dimensions deteriorate. That's different from rewarding them as a bonus.

## What the 31% Return Rate Means for Organizational Loyalty

Kovnick's model achieves a 31% guest return rate. In a tourism market saturated with options, where most travelers treat experiences as one-time consumption, that's striking. It points to something durable in the relationship between guests and operator, and, by extension, between the operator and its local partners.

Guests return because the experience depends on relationships that deepen over time, and those relationships are available through this operator alone.

Now consider what drives employee retention, sustained engagement after disillusionment specifically. Organizations that managed to retain workers who had options during the Great Resignation tended to have something structurally similar: relationships that couldn't easily be replicated elsewhere, work that was irreplaceable rather than commodified, and a sense that the worker's continued presence was necessary to what the organization claimed to do.

That 31% figure suggests existential sustainability doesn't prevent extraction alone; it generates loyalty. In organizational terms, that's the difference between workers who stay because they can't leave and workers who stay by choice.

Not a trivial distinction. Workers who stay because they're trapped are a liability waiting to become a cost center. Workers who stay by choice are the ones doing the work that matters.

## The Structural Fusion Problem

The most demanding concept in Kovnick's paper is "structural fusion", the condition where operator viability and community prosperity aren't aligned but indistinguishable. Not partners. Not stakeholders in a managed relationship. The same thing.

This is harder to achieve than it sounds. Most organizational purpose language attempts to describe something like structural fusion ("we succeed when our communities succeed," "our people are our greatest asset") without building it into the structure. The language describes a desired state; the structure continues to allow extraction.

Structural fusion in the organizational context means the organization can't succeed if its workers are being depleted. Degrading working conditions degrades the product in ways that are immediately visible and commercially costly. There's no gap between "treating workers well" and "running a viable business" because the two are mechanically connected.

This is rare. It exists in some professional service contexts where work quality depends entirely on the judgment and relationships of individual lawyers who have genuine exit options. You can't extract from those people without losing them and the revenue they generate.

In most organizational contexts, the gap between worker welfare and business outcomes is wide enough to exploit for years. The Great Resignation was, in part, the moment that gap suddenly narrowed, when labor market conditions and pandemic reflection combined to make extraction immediately costly rather than slowly corrosive.

Organizations that had already closed that gap structurally, where worker flourishing and organizational performance were indistinguishable, mostly didn't need to scramble. They weren't surprised.

## The Longitudinal Question

One of the most important methodological choices in Kovnick's research is the 19-year time horizon. Nearly two decades of operational data reveal structural properties that shorter periods cannot.

The tourism area life cycle typically takes years or decades to run its course. A destination can absorb significant pressure before degradation becomes visible. A longitudinal view reveals what short-term analysis misses: the slow accumulation of relational capital on one side, the slow erosion of it on the other.

Kovnick describes a comparison destination that went from 18 residents to 850,000 annual visitors under conventional mass tourism pressure. That transformation didn't happen overnight. At year two or five or seven, it might have looked like success. Only over the full arc does the pattern become clear.

The same dynamic applies to organizational work design. Costs of extractive design are slow to accumulate and slow to surface. Disengagement is gradual. Skill stagnation is gradual. Relationship erosion is gradual. And then, at some point (a resignation wave, a talent exodus, a sudden collapse of institutional knowledge when the wrong three people leave in the same quarter) accumulated cost becomes visible all at once.

This is why the Great Resignation confused so many organizations. They'd been running extractive work design for years without visible consequences. The pandemic compressed the timeline, made the degradation visible faster, and suddenly years of accumulated extraction showed up in turnover statistics.

Organizations wanting to understand their own structural condition need to think longitudinally the way Kovnick's framework demands. Not "what does our engagement survey say this year" but "what has our work design been doing to the relationship between this organization and its workers over time, and where does that trajectory lead in ten years?"

## Performative Purpose and Why It Backfires

There's a specific failure mode worth naming. In the years before and during the Great Resignation, many organizations invested heavily in performative purpose: mission statements, purpose-driven branding, "bringing your whole self to work" language, elaborate values frameworks. Some of it was sincere. Much of it was the organizational equivalent of a carbon offset, designed to produce the appearance of structural change without changing the structure.

The problem with performative purpose isn't that it doesn't work. It actively backfires. Workers told their work is deeply meaningful who then discover the structure is extractive (their judgment isn't trusted, their contributions go unrecognized, the work is designed to generate revenue rather than anything they care about) feel more betrayed than workers who were never promised anything.

The gap between stated purpose and structural reality is corrosive in a way that the absence of stated purpose is not, and that's precisely what the Sustainability Removal Test identifies.

Harvard Business Review has written extensively about when purpose initiatives fail, and a consistent finding is that purpose language without structural change in how work is organized, how decisions get made, and how value gets distributed increases cynicism. Workers are sophisticated enough to run their own version of the removal test: "if this purpose statement disappeared tomorrow, would anything about how I experience this job actually change?" When the answer is no, the purpose statement becomes evidence of bad faith.

## What Structural Work Design Actually Requires

I want to be careful not to turn this into a prescription list, because structural work design is context-dependent and there's no universal template. But certain properties characterize work structures where existential sustainability, where worker flourishing and organizational performance are indistinguishable, is at least possible.

**Irreplaceability of the relationship.** When what an organization produces depends on specific, accumulated, non-transferable relationships between workers and the people they serve, the organization can't extract from those workers without degrading the product. Kovnick's 100% partner retention rate over 20 years reflects relationships that have become structurally irreplaceable, and that irreplaceability protects everyone involved.

**Real decision authority at the point of work.** Not "empowerment" as a cultural value, but structural authority to make decisions that affect outcomes. When workers have genuine discretion, their judgment becomes load-bearing. Remove their engagement and you remove their judgment; remove their judgment and you degrade what you produce.

**Constraints that protect quality over volume.** Kovnick's volume caps are structural commitments that sacrifice revenue to protect the quality of relationships. The organizational equivalent would be workload constraints enforced at the level of job design rather than managed as individual wellness issues. When the constraint is structural, it's not up for renegotiation in the next budget cycle.

**Meaningful sharing of value created.** Not bonuses tied to individual performance metrics, but structural arrangements where workers capture a meaningful portion of what their work generates. This differs from profit-sharing programs, which are performative because they can be reduced or eliminated. It's the difference between an add-on and a structural feature of the relationship.

None of these are simple to implement. Most organizations resist them because they constrain the ability to extract when extraction seems expedient. Which is, of course, the point. That constraint is what makes sustainability existential rather than performative.

## The 18% Margin Question

One of the more pointed findings in Kovnick's research is that the existential sustainability model achieves 18% net margins comparable to conventional operators. This matters because it dismantles the standard objection to structural sustainability: that it's commercially unviable, that you have to choose between doing things right and doing things profitably.

The organizational parallel is the persistent claim that treating workers well (paying more, granting autonomy, constraining workloads, sharing value more equitably) necessarily reduces profitability. This claim gets made constantly and examined rarely.

A growing body of evidence suggests it's wrong, or at least far more conditional than typically presented. Organizations with genuinely low turnover, high institutional knowledge retention, and sustained engagement don't have better culture; they have lower recruitment costs, lower training costs, higher quality output, and stronger client relationships. The financial case for structural work design isn't purely altruistic.

But the more important point is subtler. Kovnick's 18% margin isn't achieved by being slightly more efficient than conventional operators. It comes from a completely different structural logic, one where costs that conventional operators externalize (onto communities, environments, the future viability of destinations) get internalized into the business model. Margins are comparable because the cost structure is different, not because the model does the same thing more efficiently.

The organizational equivalent would be work design where costs that extractive models externalize (onto workers' health, their families, their future productivity, the labor market absorbing their eventual burnout) get internalized into how the work is structured. When you stop externalizing those costs, the financial math looks different.

## A Different Way to Think About Retention

The Great Resignation forced organizations to think about retention in ways they hadn't before. Most retention thinking is reactive: someone is leaving, what do we offer them to stay? Counter-offers, title changes, flexible arrangements. These are performative strategies, removable, and they don't address the structural conditions that produced the desire to leave.

Structural retention, what existential sustainability logic would predict, is different. It's the condition where workers aren't thinking about leaving because the work itself is structured in a way that makes staying the natural choice. Not because switching costs are high or the counter-offer was good, but because the relationship between worker and work is non-extractive.

[OECD's work on job quality](https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/job-quality.html) distinguishes between "job satisfaction" measures (capturing current emotional states) and structural job quality dimensions like earnings security, working environment quality, and work organization. Structural dimensions predict long-term labor market outcomes better than satisfaction scores, which are volatile and easily manipulated by short-term interventions.

This maps directly onto the existential sustainability framework. Satisfaction scores are performative; they measure current states that can shift quickly. Structural job quality captures the architecture of the work relationship, which changes slowly and predicts long-term outcomes far better.

## The Comparison Destination Problem

The most sobering element of Kovnick's paper is that comparison destination, the place that went from 18 residents to 850,000 annual visitors under mass tourism pressure. Kovnick doesn't present this as a morality tale. It's an analytical outcome: this is what happens when structural constraints that would have protected a destination aren't in place.

Its organizational equivalent is the company that extracted aggressively from its workforce for years and then faced a sudden, catastrophic loss of institutional knowledge and talent during the Great Resignation. Most people reading this know at least one.

That 850,000 visitors number is striking because it looks like success by conventional metrics. Revenue up. Occupancy up. Growth. All indicators pointing right, until the thing that made the destination worth visiting had been consumed by the visiting.

Organizations that extracted heavily from knowledge workers through the 2010s had similar metrics. Productivity up. Revenue per employee up. Margins up. Then in 2021, accumulated cost became visible all at once.

Kovnick's framework would have predicted this. Not the exact timing, but the structural inevitability. When sustainability is performative, when conditions that make work worth doing are add-ons, they will eventually be removed, by deliberate choice or simple attrition. When they're removed, extraction becomes visible and workers leave. That 850,000 visitors figure is the last chapter of a story that was structurally determined from the beginning.

## Toward Structural Fusion in Organizations

I've spent twenty years building a business model where community benefit isn't an add-on but the actual mechanism of production. The thing that's hardest to explain to people who haven't experienced it is that structural fusion, where your success and your community's success are indistinguishable, doesn't feel like a constraint. It feels like clarity.

When the structure is right, you don't need to decide whether to prioritize workers or shareholders or community, because the structure makes those trade-offs largely irrelevant. The decision's already been made at the level of design.

That clarity is, I think, what a lot of workers were searching for when they resigned. They were looking for work designed so that their flourishing and the organization's flourishing pointed in the same direction. Work where you didn't have to choose between doing your best and doing what the system rewards.

That's a structural problem. It requires a structural solution.

Run the Sustainability Removal Test as a design diagnostic rather than only an analytical tool. Before building a retention program or a purpose initiative, ask: if we removed this tomorrow, would the fundamental experience of working here change? If the answer is no, if work would feel the same without it, then the initiative isn't addressing the structural condition. It's managing symptoms of a design problem that hasn't been solved.

Organizations that came through the Great Resignation in genuine strength (that retained their best people, attracted workers with options, maintained output quality through significant labor market disruption) weren't mostly the ones with the best retention programs. They were the ones whose work was designed so that extraction was structurally self-defeating.

Kovnick's framework predicts exactly this.

And it's the most important thing the Great Resignation has to tell us, if we're willing to hear it at the level of structure rather than symptom.

---

*This essay draws on Michael Kovnick's paper "Existential Sustainability: A Structural Approach to Anti-Extractive Tourism," available at the [SSRN Electronic Journal](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5920202). The framework developed in that paper, including the Sustainability Removal Test and the concept of structural fusion, forms the analytical foundation for the argument made here.*